Over the last few years, information technology (IT) organizations have increasingly adopted standards and best practices to ensure efficient IT service delivery. In this context, the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) has been rapidly adopted as the de facto standard. ITIL defines a set of standard processes for the management of IT service delivery organized in processes for Service Delivery (Service Level Management, Capacity Management, Availability Management, IT Continuity Management and Financial Management) and Service Support (Release Management, Configuration Management, Incident Management, Problem Management and Change Management). The service support processes, such as Configuration Management, Incident Management, and Configuration Management are some of the more common processes IT organizations have implemented to bring their service to an acceptable level for their businesses.
The implementation of ITIL processes has yielded significant results to IT organizations by defining interfaces between service providers and consumers; by clarifying the IT organizational structures, roles, and responsibilities; and by designing internal processes for the management of IT operations. IT Service Management (ITSM) is a process-based practice intended to align the delivery of IT services with the needs of the enterprise, while emphasizing benefits to customers. ITSM focuses on delivering and supporting IT services that are appropriate to the business requirements of the organization, and it achieves this by leveraging ITIL-based best practices that promote business effectiveness and efficiency. Thus, the focus of ITSM is on defining and implementing business processes and interactions there between to achieve desired results. IT services are typically built around the processes. For example, in a manufacturing application, the ITSM may provide services built around a build-to-order manufacturing process scenario. The ITSM architecture generally provides services that are capable of being directly instantiated. With a focus on processes, presenting and packaging an organization's IT needs may be a challenge in an ITSM environment. Additionally, as a plethora of new services are developed and continuously refined, the determination of services and hardware from numerous combinations may be a challenge.